Democracy

...When Didion first started writing about this kind of anarchy, she did so with a faith in the power of narrative to supply a center that would hold...

...Only after the surface of her life with Harry has been destroyed by the murder of her sister and by her decision to leave her husband does Inez realize fully how high a price she has paid for her life: "Inez thought about Harry in New York and Adlai [her son] at school and Jessie [her daughter] at B.J.'s and it occurred to her that for the first time in almost twenty years she was not particularly interested in any of them . . . They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference, genius, special claim...

...Its characters include prominent public figures — most notably, Harry Victor, a politician who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1972 — but the book also examines the inner, emotional lives of characters caught up in that orbit, counting the cost to the individual of a life dedicated to public propriety...

...All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman," she wrote in one of her most controversial essays, "The Women's Movement," "the irreconcilable Commonweal: 88 difference of it — that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death — could now be declared invalid, unnecessary...

...Yeats's "The Second Coming," a poem that supplied the title for her first collection of journalistic essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem...

...Moreover, while large parts of the novel are written in Didion's characteristically detached journalistic voice, with Didion herself as narrator-reporter, other sections are self-consciously novelistic, appealing indeed to the complexities of contemporary metafiction...

...Inez's marriage to Harry, underneath the usual publicity photographs of the successful politician and his loving wife, is a failure, and Inez has, for twenty years, nursed her love for Jack Lovett, a man also caught up in public life, but in the shadowy, clandestine way of the behind-the-scenes agent who traffics in war and revolution...

...the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

...The best passages are those that display the sharp, self-evident irony and the gift for finding just the right image that characterize the best of her work as a reporter — pieces like "Some Dreamers of a Golden Dream" and the title essay of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem...

...The mixture is not always a happy one, and in some ways this novel demonstrates that Didion is a better journalist than a novelist...

...Things fall apart...

...This is, of course, a fundamentally conservative view, and it derives in part from Didion's upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s in Sacramento, California — not the contemporary Sacramento of strip-zoning, fast-food restaurants, shopping malls, and numbing rows of tract houses providing temporary shelter for transient aircraft and computer executives, but the old Sacramento, a provincial, essentially agricultural community whose economics and politics were closer to those of jmall towns in Iowa or Indiana than to those of San Francisco, just ninety miles away...

...Democracy, Didion's fourth novel, is an ambitious, but not altogether successful rendering of this vision, attempting to explore both the anarchy of public life (the province, chiefly, of Didion's journalism) and the futility of private life (the concern of her previous fiction...

...What she saw in the America of the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to defy the sense-making conventions of narrative, and she concluded the title essay of that volume by conceding that "writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.'' The destruction of this center is very much in evidence in Democracy...

...The collapse of Inez's personal life is played out against the hypocrisy and corruption of American public life, seen both in Harry's shallow-minded politicking and in the morally questionable American involvement in Vietnam, the background to the novel...

...In journalistic essays and in novels, Didion has portrayed America as a country in which the individual has been devalued and overwhelmed by everything from media manipulation to government bureaucracy, from the hippie movement of the 1960s to the women's movement of the 1970s...

...But later, especially in the journalistic pieces collected in The White Album, published in 1979, that faith began to erode...

...It is, as Didion says, "a novel of fitful glimpses," and those glimpses do not always add up — any more, Didion would say, than do the bits and pieces of the lives of Didion's characters, or of Didion herself, or of contemporary America...

...Didion's concern with the loss of individuality in contemporary America is embodied in Democracy chiefly in the novel's central character, Inez Victor, the daughter of a prominent but shattered American family in Hawaii...

...Gregory A. Sehirmer IOAN Didion's vision of contemporary America is summed up precisely in two lines from W.B...

...For almost twenty years, Didion has been arguing that what has brought America to this pass is a gradual but inexorable disintegration of the center on which the nation was founded: faith in the individual...

...This is a hard story to tell," the narrator says early in the novel, and the book is full of false starts, abandoned shards of narrative, doubts about the validity of telling the story at all...